Much has been written about how the True Crime fetishises the perpetrator and diminishes the victim. Don’t Fuck With Cats tries and fails to cover its tracks with Lin Jun. But the kind of storytelling that creates evil, psychopathic antagonists also removes the nuance and social context of an individual’s motivation, painting in broad strokes that tend toward fascistic conceptions of criminality, justice and vengeance.
We see these passions erupt into viscerally in the group’s descent into lynch-mob righteousness, but the sleuths – and the show as a whole – display greater affection toward organised authoritarianism and discipline. I was struck by how cool the main narrator thought the the column of military-clad German Police officers arresting Magnotta were. Likewise, the Canadian Police Force are depicted as the ultimate authority on the case, the benchmark against which the Facebook Group’s research is to be measured. The fact the police can be, and are often, callously wrong does not appear or occur to anybody.
It is not new to say that Crime Drama – of which the True Crime genre is a subcategory – fulfills our fantasies of (good, lawful) order beating (bad, criminal) chaos. With DFWC, we see the ideology of Cop Shows writ into real people’s actions.
This is important because the fascistic bent through which the FB sleuths – and through them the show – view Magnotta obfuscates the crucial political aspects of Magnotta’s crime. There is no mention, for example, that he espoused White Nationalism. Surely it is worth mentioning that, prior to his murder of a Queer Chinese Man, Magnotta had written “blacks get their own countries, Chinese get their own countries … however if white people want their own countries then we are denied that right”?
It surprises me that this element was excluded. My feeling is that it is hard for a show that bases its moral centre in white American authoritarianism (cop-ism, maybe) to reconcile with the white nationalism of the criminal antagonist. This show clearly revels in portraying Magnotta as “deviant” – psychopathic, queer, a sex worker; but his politicised “whiteness” cannot form part of that deviance because of the role cop-ism plays in protecting white people.
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